


handprints

by justacitygirlbornandraisedinwhoops



Category: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain, Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn & Related Fandoms
Genre: Depression, Flashbacks, Gen, Healing, POV Second Person, Period-Typical Racism, Period-Typical Sexism, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rape Aftermath, Self-Hatred, Slurs, but i tried to make it as little graphic as i possibly could, it's dealing with a very ugly subject, nothing explicit or too graphic stated in this fic, stigma associated with male victims of rape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-27
Updated: 2018-11-27
Packaged: 2019-09-01 07:45:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16760932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justacitygirlbornandraisedinwhoops/pseuds/justacitygirlbornandraisedinwhoops
Summary: Your chest feels almost like an excavated cavity then, nearly hollow, but not quite; there is a rock that rests inside the confines of your ribs, a weight that presses against your lungs, filthy grit caged within the pristine milk white of bone. Your heart has stopped throbbing; it’s been swallowed whole, or plucked out, pricked with a pin and bled dry. Nothing inside anymore but a dead stone.





	handprints

**Author's Note:**

> So, at first I had this story under a different account, because I was a bit nervous as to how it would be received. But I find now that I do want to take ownership of it. Thanks for reading.

I.

Everything is still now.

It has become quiet tonight after such thundering commotion, such frantic urgency and staggering violence. There is noise, and there is silence, and there is quiet sound that feels _ear-splitting_. You lie alone in the tall grasses, and you know it’s impossible to be everywhere all at once, but you feel as though the whole world has stopped spinning in these moments that follow, these hours, these days. Your face hurts. Everything hurts. You think the ground will swallow you whole, right into your grave. You think your arms and legs have turned to solid wood, painfully stiff, unbending. You think your throat has been squeezed so tight your head must have popped clean off from from your body. 

You have been dealt with like a toy in too-big hands, thoughtless hands that squeeze and pull and rip; a man has torn your head from your body just because. So many thoughts relentlessly swirling around in the deafening silence. It is simply too much.

Your chest feels almost like an excavated cavity then, nearly hollow, but not quite; there is a rock that rests inside the confines of your ribs, a weight that presses against your lungs, filthy grit caged within the pristine milk white of bone. Your heart has stopped throbbing; it’s been swallowed whole, or plucked out, pricked with a pin and bled dry. Nothing inside anymore but a dead stone.

It doesn’t feel real. Reality has crashed down on you with a thud, squashed you like a bug, and yet, you still struggle to believe wholly. That wasn’t meant to happen to you. It couldn’t have, and yet, somehow, it had.

You know you’ve got to move. You cannot lie here forever. You reach out, blindly groping around, and when your fingers latch onto nothing, you sit up hastily in a sudden rush of panic. Too quickly; the blood rushes to your head and the world spins madly and you have to count to ten before you can peel your eyes open again. Your clothes. Where are they? Had he taken them? No. He wouldn’t. What purpose would he have in taking your clothes? You peer around until you see them, lying a few feet away in a patch of dead grass. You grab them hastily, slip them on with such wild abandonment you don’t pay any mind to the fact that they are inside out.

And then you see the dirt soiling your clothes, the spatters of dried blood over the front of your shirt. You had fought so hard, but so had the Man. You had punched and kicked and scratched, even resorted to _biting_ , and it still wasn’t enough.

You know you need to wash up somehow. You can’t return home like this. The pond’s water is filthy, and you wouldn’t dream of staying here any longer; the feeling is suffocating, you’ve got to get away get away get away from this place, anywhere but here would be more bearable. So, you decide you will clean up as best you can in the river.

You suppose you walk there, but you remember none of the walk, none of it at all. You drift about and know not exactly where you are going. You cannot string much together, but you worry you had died there and perhaps the cogs have just not yet begun to turn, or the sinews of your memory have not yet knit together. No. No, that’s not true. You are still alive, certainly. Pieces of you have died, though, been lopped off and held in Man’s hands like sacred objects; you imagine Him holding your head in the sweaty palms of His hands after strangling you to death.

Your throat is so tender. You raise a hand and gently feel, fingers carefully probing the soreness; you know very well that a bruise will soon blossom there. You know there are cuts on your face from falling onto the ground in the struggle, and your lip is busted, your nose, too. How could you ever explain that to your aunt? How could you explain any of this to her, to Sid? You could not; it would simply be impossible. You will _not_.

It doesn’t register to you that you have arrived to the river until the flowing water hits your skin, freezing cold, and you realize you have blindly trudged in, knee deep. You do not begin to take your clothes off again until the water swells up around your torso, and you plunge your head beneath the surface in a single swift motion.

When you come back up, your clothes are balled up in your fist. You’ve somehow accomplished gracelessly shimmying out of them. You are shaking so much it is a wonder you manage anything at all. You quickly pluck up a small stone from the river’s bottom, wade out a bit further and, trembling harder, work with all the strength you can muster to get the stains out. You scrub until they are reduced to nothing but a faded pinkish color; not entirely gone, but as good as it will get, you suppose.

The dried blood is still caked beneath your fingernails. He’s still _there_ , traces left behind that you don’t want, remnants of a battle you’d fought and fought and fought, but still somehow lost. You used to wholeheartedly believe that if you pushed hard enough, you could always get your way, no matter what. Anyone could. You’re not so sure now. You scrape it all out the best you can, and as your fingers ghost across the surface of your forearm, it is then that you are able to really take in the sight of your skin. Pale and bruised and shining wet beneath the faint gleam of moonlight. Perhaps your eyes are playing cruel tricks on you, but you do not know how to perceive it, then.

It is so ugly to you, so mercilessly ugly, so white and black and blue, you simply cannot reconcile it to yourself. You feel the walls of your skull cave in on themselves; your brain turns to mush and suddenly, suddenly you find you have become paralyzed, unable to deal with anything at all. The silence is swallowed up by your erratic, quickening breath. You struggle to breathe, to move, to think. 

_“Dammit!_ ” A sob bubbles up suddenly, coming out like bile from your cut lips. The fissures grow wider and taller until they cannot hold any longer, and the cork finally springs loose. You grab tufts of curly hair in your fists and pull, double over into the water. You are so miserable you suspect you may be dying, only, if you were dying, you would not feel as intensely as you do now. The handprints are like branding irons, scalding; the rasping, monster voice, the moist breath on your face and the clammy bare skin and, _Lord_ , help you, you think you may really die.

Simply _being_ feels impossible, and yet, here you are. Alive and whole somehow. Suddenly, your nakedness threatens to kill you with shame and fright, and you wonder if the skin you are wearing is truly your own, the skin you’ve lived in since you were born.

Until this moment, you had surrendered yourself entirely to nothingness so that you would suffer as little as possible, signed all of yourself over to it, but the nothingness is so unforgiving, it chews you up and spits you back out. Everything returns to you in a sickening rush. 

Why do you get the awful feeling that you will never again be the same after this night? 

It had not been your fault, and yet, somehow it had. You should not have walked out all alone in the dark when it was so late. You should not have taken the route home you had, where the path did not lay out in the open. You should not have taken your hard-soled shoes off your feet while you lazed around by the pond; maybe if you hadn’t, you could have landed harder kicks.

Everything in this moment feels like the weak link in an already-broken chain; the what-ifs, the could-have-beens, the if-onlys.

It really sets in then. You begin to sob so uncontrollably you think you may vomit. The sound does not fully register to your ears and you attempt to separate yourself from this being that wildly cries; you listen to a young man wail like a child in the dead of the night and vaguely think they are the saddest, loneliest, most ridiculous noises you have ever heard in your life. You sob and sob and sob until your mouth becomes parched, your throat closes up and your eyes swell up.

Gradually, very gradually, the sobs begin to die down until they are nothing but choked gasps, ragged breathing and baby hiccups. You always hated that when you were a boy. You don’t think you’ve ever cried so hard before, but you know the mechanics of crying intimately, know that afterwards you will be nothing but a heap of tears and sticky lashes and running nose. Crying is ugly, too, you think; except crying has always been ugly to you, but it is so much worse now. You are so grateful when it finally comes to an end and you are able to breathe again.

You look around when you are finished, distraught, as if you worry someone has seen or heard you. No matter what has just happened to you; it is not a dignified thing for a boy, let alone a young man your age to do.

You decide it is time to go home now.

You plow through the water until you reach the riverbank, slip your clothes back on you for the second time that night—you kneel onto the wet soil and promptly puke, before wiping your mouth, taking a moment to breathe and then rising up again—and start back on the familiar path that leads towards the Sawyer homestead.

Again, you know where you are heading to, but you do not remember how you get there. You can only vaguely scrounge up bits and pieces; you trip over the root of a tree and nearly fall over, you walk past Joe Harper’s house and his mother gasps from her place in her rocking chair before scurrying inside, you hear the comfortless sound of a dog howling in the far off distance. And then, finally, you see your house up ahead. When you arrive, you quietly swing the white picket fence door open first and then shut it behind you. You can make out the flickering light of the candle from the kitchen inside.

It hits you then, like a blow to head: They are waiting for you in there, your aunt and Sidney. Of course they are. You imagine it’s been an hour, in the very least, since they were expecting your return, and you are still not there. If you know her well at all, you know that she is simultaneously worried sick and prepared to skin you alive the moment you appear within her grasp. 

You know not what you are doing, or exactly why you are doing it, and yet you still _do_ these strange things, like you are running off instinct now. You make your way around the yard until you stop in front of the tree that lays out by the window to your room. You pause for a moment and listen to the roar of blood rushing in your ears. Then, you begin to make your way up the tree. You grimace almost immediately and press your forehead up against the bark’s rough surface, hating the slight pause because it allows you a moment to recollect thoughts and memories you don’t want. 

It _hurts_. You bleed and tear up a bit from the pain and hate yourself for it, but you will not give up. If you choose to pass that threshold, you will be forced to face them. You know better than to fool yourself into thinking that you are strong enough to deal with it all. You just couldn’t handle Aunt Polly’s tears or Sid’s unhinged, staring eyes. All you want to do now is sleep; if you sleep, then you will not have to feel, if only for a bit. 

You know what story you will fabricate for them when they see come morning. _He wanted my pocket change and I reckon it made him awful sore when I wouldn’t give him what I hadn’t got._ All you must explain is the beating. That’s it. For them, it will be as though nothing exists but the beating.

Up the tree you climb, grunting as softly as you can all the way, bones aching, face throbbing. Your legs and arms are seized by uncontrollable tremors, and twice, your shaking hands threaten to lose their grasp on a limb and you nearly fall. But it is up, up, up, you must go. Each time you feel weak and wonder if you can reach the branch that stretches out towards your room, you remind yourself of Aunt Polly’s face, Sid’s face, if they were to see you like this. You manage, somehow.

You don’t remember much afterwards. You climb in through the window, shut it behind you and scramble into bed, still quivering wildly. All you can think to do is bury yourself as deep as possible within the blankets, as if it were an endless sea you could drown yourself in, but it is not so. You are exhausted from the fighting, the hurting, the scrubbing, the walking and climbing and shaking. Sleep is so merciful to you; it wordlessly takes you, and just for a little while, before morning arrives, you escape and you dream, and it is like you cease to exist altogether.

II.

“ _Tom!_ ”

Noise. You start and groan softly, the noise like that of a door creaking on its hinges.

“Tom, hang it all! You had better get up or Aunt P…”

You inevitably wake the next morning to Sid relentlessly hounding at you for sleeping in, as is to be expected. He stops mid sentence as soon as he notices, the scowl falling instantly from his face. He looks at you, you look at him, and the silence feels smothering, like a cloth. His eyes linger on your face, your throat, all that they possibly can. There is something understood between you then, something that causes you to feel the deepest of resignation within your bones. You are not lazing around for nothing. You are hurt. Badly.

And that is when he screeches for Aunt Polly. The way he shouts her name makes you feel like you are being told on, for some reason, makes you clam up instinctively, as though you have been making mischief again and you are being ratted out. You stay put in bed, frozen with dread, as he runs down the stairs and brings her to the room you and him share.

You knew you would have to explain yourself to her the next morning, which is now, which has come far too soon, and yet you are still overwhelmingly unprepared for all the questions, the startled glances and the tears of distress and remorse that she sheds when she first gets a glimpse at you.

She takes your face in her hands and cries over you. “I allowed I’d give you a good licking for not comin’ home to me last night. I was certain you’d been out and about causing trouble when I saw you lying dead asleep in your bed after I went up.” She brushes the hair from your face with a gentle sweep of her hand and kisses your face. You remain deathly silent as it becomes damp with her tears. “I hadn’t a clue. Lord forgive me.”

In the end, you remain wordless practically the whole night through, having briefly gone mute. (Could you imagine the thought? _You_ , speechless.) You say nothing as she carefully swabs away at the cuts that litter your countenance and puts hot water on the stove for your bath. She leaves you alone to clean yourself, yet again, but the filth runs deeper than your skin and so you don’t feel like much is accomplished. She lingers in the hallway and hovers over you like are so little again and she wants to make you feel like you are a big boy who can take baths all by himself, but in reality, she stays within a wary distance and watches with a cautious eye from afar. She is so worried for you, you can tell. You are too busy wondering if you will ever be okay again to reassure her with lies that you are already just that.

In the end, though she desperately attempts to pry you open for an explanation, you cannot even offer up your tall tale that goes like this: A man simply wanted your pocket change and beat you for it when you would not fork it over. That is all. 

III.

You burrow yourself deep within your mother and father when the hurt becomes crushing, maddening, smothering. In these vague, forgotten figures, you curl yourself up and away from the rest of the world, and they love you, regardless of everything you’ve done, everything you’ve failed to do; all the ways you’ve been stupid, selfish, loathsome. Regardless of how ugly you feel. You cannot remember what your mother’s face looked like (you’ve been told so many times you are her spitting image), and you certainly cannot remember your father in the slightest. All you know from your aunt’s countless stories is this: You were theirs. And so, you begrudgingly accept this truth and crawl within it, wrap yourself up in it like a blanket when you worry most about strange men and ponds frozen over and tall grasses that conceal every awful secret that was ever meant to be heard.

If you cannot protect yourself, your mother and father will.

IV. 

You dream of a sweet little boy whose face is covered in angel’s kisses, whose hair curls ridiculously and shines auburn in the morning sun, and he runs towards a man and a woman—your mother and father, they _must_ be—with arms outstretched, with total abandonment to himself, a smile on his face. They pick him up and gather him close to themselves, and he feels like the last piece to a puzzle. Three somehow meld into one, separate beings made whole, melting like ribbons of wax, happy, happy tears stagnating upon their cheeks, mother and father curving in delicately, protectively around child like an egg shell. Surreal. It is so all so surreal, so perfectly ludicrous to you.

Somehow, they are saving you in a way you were certain was impossible.

You are not lost, or broken, or too far gone. Not with them in your dreams. 

V.

The soft patter of summer rain drizzling on the roof can be faintly heard within your room. Aunt Polly is baking a pie, apple pie, your favorite. The mouthwatering scent travels throughout the house and enters through the small crack in the door, filling your room.

You lie alone in bed, burrowed beneath the sheets, tossing and turning and hoping for sleep to take you again. But you’ve already been sleeping for hours now, so much so that it can hardly be called a nap, and you know you will just feel nauseous later on if you continue. The only reason your aunt would _ever_ allow you to spend so much time in bed is if she were worried, and thought you to be in dire need of rest, so you know this is how she presently regards you. If she cannot force the words from your mouth, she has no choice but to act in distress from afar and care for you with heedful, motherly hands.

As it often does, the silence becomes deafening, and the boredom becomes crushing. You regard the barnwood bookshelf in the corner of your room with a slightly wary eye. Before, you’d tried to read bit by bit each day, or at least, you’d been advised to by Mary so that you could “love it more and more, by and by,” as she put it. But you remember thumbing through them so speedily at times, cooping yourself up in the parlor or lazing by the quiet riverside, that you’d sometimes finish them within the span of a day or two.

You haven’t picked up a book since it happened, but the rain sounds so loud, so piercing to you that you resolve to drown it out with whatever you can, so you quickly scramble out of bed and shuffle over to your little bookshelf. _Ivanhoe, The Count of Monte Cristo, Don Quixote_ and _The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main_ are a few that your eyes instinctively spy out, but you don’t feel like reading any.

Then, your gaze flits over to the few biographical novels drowning in a sea of fiction and fantasy. You find her, or more like, she finds _you_ in this moment of irresistible curiosity and almost excruciating wistfulness. Saint and soldier all at once, the Maid of Orléans.

Joan of Arc had always been one of your favorite heroes in your childhood. You remember being initially put off by this blatant and yet outrageous truth: She was a woman. How could a woman possibly achieve what the dog eared pages of your book told you this Joan of Arc had? She had swayed you in the end, however—bearer of divine inspiration, leader of armies, ruthless war hero, so courageous and yet so sweet and humble. You’d pored over book after book written about her; these books still sat pretty on your bookshelf, collecting dust. You hadn’t touched the old things in so long. You always felt the need to be swept off into newer, more exciting places, but she’d left her imprint on you and found her way into your childish aspirations, and there she would stay.

You carefully grab the aged spine of the book and pull it from the shelf, studying the cover intently, deep in contemplation. Not surprised, you find that you _do_ want to read it, and flop onto your bed, clutching it tight in your hands before opening to any indiscriminate spot. You flip through random pages, reading large chunks of text here and there, feeling too flighty, to say the least, to try and scrutinize it in its entirety. Then, you see it. You vaguely remember reading it as a boy and not thinking much of it, because how important could this small part of your Joan’s life have been when it sat beside violence and war and God’s voice. 

It is no less than a fist to the gut now. 

The guards had tried to ravish her in prison, but she, _she_ had done all that she possibly could to prevent it from happening. She donned herself with the attire of men, as she’d always done on the battlefield, secured herself tight with soldier’s clothing and bound herself up with chords. They could not do what they wished with her this way. They would struggle and fumble, or they would not try at all, the clothing appearing too daunting or feeling too heavy in their hands. Her protection was like a maze for them through which they found no exit. This way, she stayed safe, as safe as possible for a girl who was imprisoned and soon to be carted off to a criminal’s death at the stake.

Joan had prevailed against the bad men who threatened her. Why hadn’t you?

She undeniably possesses an air of invincibility, remains untouchable in your eyes in so many different ways, but there are some things that you cannot wipe entirely clean from your mind. She was woman, woman, woman. You are not.

You learn. Not the heroes from your books—not Robin Hood, Don Quixote, Edmond Dantés, not Joan of Arc, either. All daring and brave, precisely calculated and clever in every way. Some had been transformed by violence in one way or another, it is true, but the simple fact still stands blindingly clear to you. 

They don’t get raped.

VI.

More often than not, you put all the strength you can muster into not thinking of Him. Unfortunately, the instances you succeed are rare; it only causes the thoughts to swarm all the more fervently. You run and run and run from Him, but you never manage to slip free from His grasp; the harder you try, the less relief you find, the worse it gets.

Then there are days when you willingly hurl yourself headfirst into the throes of somehow attempting to reconcile yourself with it all.

You’ve never felt like you’ve hated anyone more, no one could ever hate anyone more than you hate the Man; sometimes you hate yourself but mostly, mostly you hate Him. You think of the Count of Monte Cristo, consumed by hate, storing up more and more of it within himself so that he would be ready when the moment of retribution came at last. As a child, you had always regarded Edmond with fearful admiration; how noble and gallant a man with a hardened heart like the Count was. He was hell to be reckoned with. Now, you understand. The fear and the hate squeeze you like a vice, squeeze the life right out of you. How poor and tortured a man like the Count is.

You are told by a preacher behind a pulpit during stuffy services that if you are struck on one cheek, then you should offer the assailant the other, too. You are told you should forgive 77 times over when you’ve been wronged. You are told that you should parcel out redemption like it is nothing, and that is the thing; you are only _told_ to do these things, and the more you’re told, the less you want to. Forgive (you will not) and forget (you cannot). They don’t understand. They just don’t understand what it’s like.

VII.

You and Sidney are outside in the yard one evening, because your aunt had told you to toss out the stale bread to the birds. She always loved to give whatever she had left to spare to them. You cast out small crumbs here and there, and it catches your attention then that a small bluebird has strayed out onto the open path where the two of you lie in wait. You find yourself smiling, just a bit, when it begins to peck away at the little morsels, but you do not smile for long. 

Out of nowhere, there is Peter. He snatches the poor, unwitting thing like a flash, sinks his teeth into its wildly convulsing body, and a sudden rush of horror makes the blood in your veins turn to ice. You hear its desperate little trills and then the beat of silence that follows, and your heart drops like lead to your gut. It dies, just like that, snuffed out within the blink of an eye. It’s a fact of life that you know, you’ve known ever since you were old enough to comprehend and think for yourself. There is predator and there is prey. _It was only a bird. That’s just what cats_ do _._ Allowing yourself to get so wound up may be senseless, but you cannot help it; your breathing picks up, catches in your throat and wilts on your lips. 

“ _Peter!_ ” you shriek, voice hoarse and thick, and beside you, Sid starts at the sheer volume of it. “Blame it all, you _awful_ thing! Go on! Shoo!” 

Sid remains quiet as he watches the suddenly apprehensive cat flatten his ears and hastily scramble away from the scene, limp bird still clasped tight in his jaws. You simply stand in silence once your flailing arms have lowered to your sides again, fists clenching until your knuckles are white as bone. Something heavy in the air shifts between you and him, unspoken and yet understood. Waiting to be spit out like poison.

“...Tom?” 

“Damn cat.”

When you were little, you used to think it was a morbid but undeniably fascinating thing to watch, your house cat kill birds, rats, mice, running on pure instinct. Now, the sight of it makes you sick to your stomach and you don’t know why, except maybe you do, but you absolutely hate to see so much of yourself in the helpless, flitting creature caught between Peter’s teeth.

Poor bird. It walked out all alone and got caught. Poor, unsuspecting little bird.

VIII.

You had fought before it happened, fought tooth and nail, and you didn’t stop fighting afterwards.

The Man had apologized to you when it was over.

_“I’m, I‘m so sorry. You’re just a boy. I‘m awful…awful sorry.”_

You wanted to say then that you weren’t a boy, you were 17, going to be 18 by next June. But you didn’t.

Man had begun to weep. The tears oozed out, cascaded down His clean-shaven face. He was too clean, not ugly or leering or bulking enough. His breath hadn’t reeked of whiskey, He hadn’t been intoxicated beyond coherent thought. He was a disgusting creature, undoubtedly, but all the signals were crossed. He wasn’t like the others. He didn’t fall neatly into a category or look the part. There were bad men like Injun Joe who murdered, and there were bad men like Huck’s pap who hit their sons. There were bad men who raped, you had supposed, but Man didn’t fit the image you pictured. Nothing felt fair. Nothing made sense anymore.

And now, _now_ He was sorry? _Now_ He was apologizing?

You turned your head away, unable to bear it, grass pricking like tiny needles into your cheek. You cried then, too, and this seemingly doubled the Man’s remorse. You felt like you were going insane. The Man called you a poor thing and said again that he was so sorry, and you cried harder, not knowing what to say, not wanting to relieve the Man’s guilt, not in the slightest. This was your weapon, you told yourself then: the tears that stained your cheeks. You sobbed and shook as you lay beneath Him and didn’t care. The Man used violence, you used shame. You wanted to make Him feel so irredeemable, so _awful_ , the way you had felt, somehow. 

You learned then, how to hate in silence, _with_ silence.

The Man had tried to shush you, begged you to please be quiet, but you refused and He lost His nerve. He didn’t wait around any longer. He ran off as though He were scared of you and left you there, all alone in the tall grasses, left you there in pieces, with no one else to clean up the mess but yourself. The Man was not sorry.

IX.

Sometimes you cannot help but wonder how yours and Huck’s lives compare when they lie beside one another, how different and alike the pair of you are. You think of how Huck’s seems to be such a bottomless tragedy at times; how you’d used to regard him both with envy and pity when he was still tiny and underfed and unloved and went through the winters cold and weary. Sad and lonely and loveless, from beginning to end, it would seem. He appears happy enough, but you still wonder sometimes.

And then, there is your life.

You can’t really sit and cry over memories of your dead parents, because that’s the thing—you can’t remember them. You miss them, you want to know who they were, what you meant to them, but that is all. You used to just be an orphan. Your life, for the most part, had been a grand story. You remember becoming town hero when you were only 12 years old, you remember finding Murrel’s Treasure in the cave and saving both Becky and yourself from dying in its endless maze, and you remember gleaning $6,000 from the ordeal, money still sitting pretty in the bank. And you had been such a heroic little boy, such a good little boy, sharing your treasure with Huck, juvenile pariah, who owned not a cent to his name.

From beginning to end, this is how your story is sung: Adventure.

Now you’re 17 and not so little anymore, maybe not being showered in constant adoration the way you had, because lately you've been not as heroic, more angry and stinging and rough around the edges. Now you're just not the same as you always used to be, and try as you might, it bleeds through so many of your different masks; your astounding confidence and your brilliance and your security in these things.

You place your life besides Huck's, try to compare them and come up empty handed, with nothing to say. All you can manage to do is ponder at fate’s fickleness and cruelty and wonder how you are so different than you used to be while Huck, Huck is the same Huck he’s always been.

X.

You cannot help but begin to wonder: If He is the Man, than who are you? You wonder if you’re nameless to Him as well, faceless and just a blank wall meant to be vandalized in a single night. You imagine you are probably so much more forgettable to the Man than He is to you. You are a hostage to the memory of His face, His voice, His hands, never to be ransomed back; it’s been ingrained into every nook and cranny, seeped into every crevice of your brain. Man rapes and then forgets you ever existed.

You begin to realize, then: He’s still out there, somewhere. He has probably done it before, and He will probably do it again.

XI.

One night, you are not consumed by nightmares, and your sleep is not dreamless either.

You see yourself. 

You are broken. Cracked. Chipped around the edges. You fall apart so beautifully, somehow, in a strange way that only a dream could achieve, because people falling apart is not, in fact, a beautiful thing. You know. You see the handprints on your throat; the mottling purples and blues, the ugly yellows and greens that delicately frame the edges like light foam. There is too much to look at, too many tears, too many welts to count, and you suppose these are not the same as counting angel’s kisses, anyway.

But they do not shy away from you, or from the ugly wounds, or the cavities you’ve unearthed in yourself, the graves you’ve dug.

They have grown older and more wrinkled than the last you’ve seen them. Laugh lines around the eyes, graying hair like salt and pepper. Haven’t you grown older, too? They lie down beside you, in the tall grasses, and they cry with you. These are not the happy, happy tears from before, and they do not stagnate; they flow, and flow, and flow. No more secrets. But it is alright. Ma threads her slender fingers through your hair; Pa takes your hand.

It is like of a grain of sand in a heap of ashes. A small piece of goodness found buried beneath so much misery. You hold onto it with both hands, with so much cautious hope.

You try to convince yourself as the dreams do, night after night: You don’t need to be the sweet, blemish-free child from before for them to love you this way. You don’t need to be perfect for them to love you perfectly, for anyone to love you perfectly.

XII.

There are no flowery phrases you can use to describe it. It is what it is, and it is rape. That is enough. You become less and less afraid to think of the word with each passing day; it solidifies it, it calcifies it, it causes it to congeal out in the open. You don’t want it to fester anymore. 

It is a taboo notion, indeed: a man being on the receiving end of such a thing. Could it be possible? But you find that you _do_ believe, somehow. It _had_ happened to you all those months ago.

If you cannot tell the truth to anyone, you will tell the truth to yourself, in the very least. It is your secret and yours alone.

XIII.

You try, try so hard not to allow what has happened to you consume you, _become_ you. You tell yourself you still want to be Tom Sawyer, you still _are_ Tom Sawyer. Maybe you are not the little boy who tricked his friends into doing his chores for him, maybe you would not fake your death and then attend your own funeral or play pirates or bandits or robbers anymore. But who would this Tom Sawyer boy grow into, had those what-ifs and could-have-beens and if-onlys been? 

Perhaps he would be president of the country, granted he is not hanged first, of course. Perhaps he would become the dashing captain of a steamboat that tugs on down the Mississippi, or a well-to-do lawyer whose sharp wits could get him clean out of any predicament. Still so clever, just the way you’d always been before. Now you often get headaches if you think too hard, because so many of your thoughts are just no good anymore, but your big brain is still in there somewhere, you’re certain. You always reassure yourself it just needs time before it comes out from hiding again.

Some days it is easier to convince yourself that you are still the same Tom, just different than before. Perhaps wounded, but still Tom. Saying you are more cynical than the perpetually starry-eyed you from back then is a gross understatement, but it is still _you_. A blossom dealt with blight, but still sprouting up tenuously through the cracks of the cobblestone. You have not turned to a weed, you are only having trouble growing, having been starved sunlight you needed so badly.

You wonder if your chances of becoming president are just as good as they’d ever been. You notice wondering is better than thinking it is a fact they are not.

XIV.

Your 18th birthday comes and goes like a weightless feather being carried off in the wind. It slips through your fingers and means practically nothing to you, and it makes you sad because you always thought your 18th birthday would be such a big deal, such a timeless, irreplaceable event in your life. Aunt Polly invites all of your friends over, she even invites _Huck_ , and if that doesn’t show how entirely overwrought she is these days with attempting to make you perfectly happy again, the way you used to be, nothing does. It is something neither of you are willing to say aloud, but understood all the same. You are not carefree the way you used to be.

At the party, you notice a girl your age you are not familiar with drifting wordlessly through the small crowds littered here and there enclosed within your white picket fence. She looks at you and you look at her. You realize with a pang in your chest that she undeniably resembles Becky, same fine blond hair bunched up nice in a chignon, same pale blue eyes and cupid bow lips and sweet freckles smattered across the bridge of her nose.

You allow yourself to moon over her from afar—you have not grown so bold as to walk up to her, the wound is still too fresh for that—and it gives you a slight pause when you realize. You have begun allowing yourself to moon over girls again.

XV.

One evening, you see the sunset’s faint glow light up through the thin shroud of leaves on the Autumn Brilliance, flecked with gold and framed by sunlight, dancing gently in the breeze. The wind swallows up any and every other noise to be heard, and the sky around you has turned to a dappled rose, a soft, warm haze like a dome sheltering the earth. 

You’ve attended church services and been ushered off to Sunday school for as long as you could remember—so much of your life in this pious little town has been a thoughtless offering to this God you don’t really know with words you don’t really mean, with prayers you are never entirely certain get through—but you think this is the first time you’ve truly wondered what you believe in. You wonder if there really is a God, and if He really loves you. You wonder if you have been loved into existence, the way you’ve been told you have. “You are loved, and so you are,” your preacher had said once during a sermon, and the words resound like a gong now, ricochet off the walls of your brain until you find it is undeniably one of the most consoling thoughts you’ve ever dwelled on. You are comforted first by the thought of your dead parents loving you, and now God. You wonder why you mull so long and hard over things that you have no solid evidence of being true, but this doesn’t stop you.

This short-lived comfort does not come without any reservations. The happiness does not cure you; you still don't believe in everything, and you're not sure if you ever will. You wonder if you will be old and gray and wrinkled and lying on your death bed before you can forget. But still, besides everything, it makes sense. What is the point of believing in a God that doesn’t love? You want to love so badly; you want to _be_ loved so badly. What is the point of anything without it?

You think that in this very moment, as you watch the tree sway and feel a gust of wind against your face—these gifts made of everything somehow and by the Hands of some Creator, you don’t know exactly who—you find it more easy to believe than ever before.

XVI.

Once, in the middle of the night, Huck chucks pebbles at your window until you inevitably stir awake and gaze down eagerly below, only to see him with wrapped candy clutched tight in his fist, a paper bag packed brimful with licorice sticks, your favorite. He waves the bag expectantly up at you and beams, the sweetgrass stem clutched between his teeth bouncing excitedly.

“Just like when we was little,” he whisper shouts, and although you’re certain your stomach would presently disagree with any and all sweets, you give him a lopsided grin and laugh, laugh for _real_ for the first time in a little while, and nod down at him. You climb out onto the roof and shimmy down the tree effortlessly, as it has become a practiced skill throughout the years, and when you meet him at the bottom, you realize you are not afraid of going out at night, not as long as you have a friend with you.

The two of you run off together and sit out on the stoop in front of the general store. The streets are dead and empty and silent, and this is no surprise to either of you, considering how late it is. Huck wordlessly passes the bag of treats over to you with a smile, and you accept. The two of you talk and snigger and simper on, and Huck tells jokes, and you find yourself bursting into peals of laughter every now and then as if nothing has changed, nothing has happened at all this past year. You eat all the while and don’t realize you have eaten too much until your stomach protests, quite ardently, and then you quiet abruptly.

At first, you think it’s funny _ha ha ha_ because, oh, reckless you, careless you, you’ve simply had too much to eat, too many sweet treats in a single night and now you’ve got a tummy ache. The nervous titters rise up from your throat and spill from your lips like water, but Huck doesn’t join in because he sees the way your hair clings to your forehead, quickly becoming damp with sweat, and the way your skin has been drained of its color, white beneath the pale moonlight.

You clap a clammy hand over your mouth and squeeze your eyes shut tight, and suddenly you’re not laughing anymore, because you cannot stand this feeling, this feeling you get whenever you are about to vomit. It makes you think of _then,_ you cannot help but think of that first moment you reached the riverbank and doubled over and retched into the dirt. The sensation of your soaking wet clothes hanging heavy against your skin comes rushing back first, and then the grit pressing against your trembling knees, and then, that unbearable, stabbing awareness of a certain degree of filth that you can never wash clean, no matter how hard you scrub.

“Tom?” Huck says, and you shake your head, hum out a shaky _Mm-mm, nonono_. “Tom, what’s wrong?”

You are in that awful in between stage, where you are not yet sick enough to actually _hurl_ , but you are still sick enough to feel queasy and light-headed and it is simply torture to wait to empty the contents of your stomach like this. So, without uttering a single word, you push yourself up from the stoop and take a few shaky steps forward, and you stick your finger down your throat, and you finally retch. Your vomit splashes against your shoes, and you blanch at the sight of it pooling on the ground once you are finished. Your breath comes out in juddering sighs and your hands begin to tremble at your sides.

After a few seemingly endless moments engulfed by terrible silence, save for the sound of you struggling to catch your breath, you turn around. Huck is still there, watching with his tired, limpid, sad eyes. He looks as though he is about to burst into tears, and you almost begin to tease him for it— _What are you fixing to cry for? What kinda chicken-livered baby cries when they see puke?_ —but the way his stare bores right through you causes you to ultimately decide against it.

You slowly walk back towards your place on the stoop beside him, and it isn’t until then that you realize hot tears have sprung to your eyes. You are glad you hadn’t said anything, what a hypocrite you would’ve been then. You hike up the leg of your trousers and spit any last foul remnants from your mouth between your legs.

Huck decides, after a long while, to quietly press his hand against your back. Both of you have known since forever that he has never exactly been good with touch, or words—he’s quite fumbling and graceless when it comes down to it—but you understand what he is trying to say all the same. He knows something had happened to you, everyone who ever knew you well at all knows something had happened, he just doesn’t know what. But he still tries to carefully probe his way through all the barriers you’ve set up between yourself and him, between yourself and _everyone._ You remember how meanly you’d treated him as a boy, how the stream of insults that flowed from your mouth rarely came to a dead end, how he was stupid, sap-headed, had no brains in him. You know you are not entirely innocent now, but you have grown less impatient with him, a bit less rough around the edges, somehow.

”Sorry,” you murmur faintly, and he shakes his head— _Don’t_ _have_ _to_ _apologize,_ _Tom_ —and you realize he thinks you are apologizing for getting sick.

The two of you sit in silence together until you decide it is time for you to head home.

This, you think. This is how things will be from now on. You have gotten better undeniably, but _this_ is just how things will be every now and then.

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed, please please please add a comment! It would mean the world to me <3


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